Today we went on our in-hospital tour of the Hospital Universitario Austral, which carried us through the different departments of the center, from triage to neonatal. Everything was well organized and the technology was quite advanced. One of the key themes of their mission statement is the “pursuit of truth and a culture of life”. I found myself pondering how the pursuit of truth might present itself in a hospital setting such as this one, and my best answer is through accurate care at fair costs to the patients. The true moral point of a hospital is to heal patients, not to turn a profit. Hospital Universitario Austral does an excellent job of making sure to provide their patients with the correct and best possible care they can give. When patients enter into the emergency ward, HUA distinguishes patients based on a computerized five tier priority ranking, a system no other hospital in the area has in place. There are some emergency departments in the city that have more basic three tier systems, but they are not able to handle the same amount of patients with the same efficiency of care with respect to priority. When it comes to the “culture of life”, I have found Hospital Universitario Austral is expressing more than hope that the hospital will do their best to save patients from dying, but also entrenching their staunch anti-abortion stance. In fact, one of our guest lecturers went out of his way to discuss the immorality of abortions in a talk supposedly about innovation. While the hospital is not technically Catholic, I am yet to discover a room without a cross and have found several chapels littered throughout the campus. Because Argentina is such a predominantly Catholic country this comes as no surprise, but nonetheless I would not expect it to manifest itself this much in a hospital. In Argentina, abortion has been ruled illegal so it is no surprise to see that the hospital does not perform them; however, it has surprised me how openly against them they have been. To be objectively pursuing truth, I believe only acknowledging the beliefs of your own religion to be contradictory to that goal. I respect their right to their beliefs, but don’t agree with passing them off as truth in a non-religious environment. I challenge them to fully take a side in declaring an official catholic connection or otherwise respecting the many different views toward a topic as delicate as this.